this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
1110 points (97.0% liked)

Comic Strips

12583 readers
3219 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Source: Alzwards Corner

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Alien didn't swap anyone. The characters were initially written as gender neutral without first names.

[–] SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca 8 points 9 months ago

Kind of. Excerpt from this article by Ridley Scott:

“I think the idea actually came from Alan Ladd, Jr. I think it was Alan Ladd who said, ‘Why can’t Ripley be a woman?’ And there was a long pause that, at that moment, I never thought about it. I thought, why not? It’s a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went.”

This was the late 70s. “Man” was still so powerfully default that Ridley Scott had not even thought of the possibility of casting a leading woman action hero before a meeting with an exec. That, to me, is clearly a gender swap moment, because until that moment, it was a given that Ripley would be a man. The gender-neutral script just allowed for the possibility.